MARINE CORPS AIR STATION YUMA, Ariz. -- The Navy abolished the occupational specialty of dental technician Oct. 1 and merged the roughly 3,000 sailors of that specialty with the Navy’s 24,000 hospital corpsmen.
The station Branch Medical Clinic held a ceremony Oct. 3 to officially recognize the merger and honor the now defunct rate of dental technician.
The merger will benefit the Navy and sailors by saving cost through streamlining administration, creating diversity in the hospital corpsman job field and creating promotion opportunities for the sailors with the former specialty of dental technician, said Senior Chief Petty Officer Cliff White, acting BMC senior enlisted leader.
“You’re taking a small, very stove-piped promotion track for your dental technicians and putting it into the same track as another 24,000 sailors, so it will open things up a little,” said White.
Though they will now have the specialty of hospital corpsman, the dental technicians will still have the same Navy Enlisted Classification and will be doing primarily the same job, said White, though there is a lot of cross training being held to familiarize hospital corpsmen with dental skills and dental technicians with corpsman skills.
Sailors take a specialty-specific test twice a year that is scored toward promotions. The hospital corpsmen will now be tested on both dental and medical skills, said White.
This added diversity to the specialty will allow sailors more opportunity to move to different NECs within the rate, said former dental technician Petty Officer 2nd Class Denis Lawrence, a San Diego native.
“This will open up a lot of opportunities for myself, as well as my other former-dental-technician counterparts, to have (opportunities to work in) different professions within the hospital corpsman rating -- X-ray, medical lab and a handful of others -- and vice versa,” said Lawrence.
When he joined the Navy, Lawrence wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a corpsman, but the specialty was full, so he took dental instead. After 16 and a half years in the Navy, his dream has become a reality.
The specialty of dental technician was established in 1947, and with it goes a lot of tradition, said Lawrence, but the merger’s advantages will make up for it.
“It’s worth it to me,” Lawrence said. “It’s going to open up promotions. I’m just an E-5, and I’ve been in for sixteen and a half years, so hopefully this will open things up for me.”
The BMC’s dental technicians belong to the 1st Force Service Support Group, and the merger and cross training they receive will help them during deployments, said Lawrence, who served in Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, where he often worked in triage and decontamination.
“We go out there and perform a dental function but we do get pulled to do things that are more on the medical side, such as decontamination and various other simple medical functions,” he said. “We are always side by side with the corpsmen.”
For dental technicians who want to work more closely with Marines on the front lines, the merger will give them a better opportunity to do so, said Lawrence.
“For those folks, it’s a great thing that they’re finally officially corpsmen and can easily merge in with the medical people and function as full-time corpsmen,” he said.